


Takes Hostages

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cousin Incest, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-29
Updated: 2012-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-31 02:15:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At four, his aunt laughs and says, "don't be shy, Mark, give her a kiss!" and he grudgingly leans over to smack his mouth against Erica's cheek. At nineteen, Dustin laughs and crows out, "go on, Markster, give her a kiss!" and Erica beats him to it, pinning him back and curving her spine to meet his grin with hers. [AU].</p>
            </blockquote>





	Takes Hostages

**Author's Note:**

> Or, the AU where Mark and Erica were raised as cousins. I blame hapakitsune entirely.
> 
> That was your HERE THAR BE INCEST warning, btw.
> 
> The title is from a Neil Gaiman quote: _"[...] They do something dumb one day like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”_
> 
> You can read this here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/107541.html).

-

+

They are four years old, and Erica gets a cake. It has pink frosting around the rim and pink ballet slippers in the middle, even though Mark knows for a fact that Erica asked her mom for the one with the red, yellow, and blue dinosaurs, which is the same one Mark asked for. Erica likes pink, but not as much as she likes dinosaurs. 

This is why she is Mark's favorite.

She's opening presents now, and it's kind of boring and no fun to watch somebody _else_ open presents, so he sneaks into the kitchen and looks up at the counter, where he can just see the shiny side of the cake pan. Mark is very smart, everybody says so, so he pulls a stool over and climbs up, and takes his little finger and scoops some of the frosting up, careful not to take too much in case somebody notices, because it's not doing something wrong if he doesn't get caught. He sticks it in his mouth, and when it's gone, he looks over his shoulder and then swipes some more. It's still not much, he thinks, except then there's suddenly an entire corner of the icing missing, and he still wants more.

He lingers too long, of course, and Erica's mom finds him there, finger slick with spit and stained pink around the cuticles. She swats at him, squawking, but not hard like she means it. Mark likes Erica's mom, and he assumes that everybody's aunts are like her, with big glasses that are super thick like the bottom of Coke bottles, and lots of curly hair that's both a little gold and a little silver, like sun and moon and stars.

Later, when Erica is about to blow out her candles, his aunt laughs from behind the huge beetle-glossy eye of the camera lens and says, "Don't be shy, Mark, give her a kiss! It's her birthday!"

Mark screws up his face, because _gross,_ but he did lick the icing off her cake, and that's kind of gross, too.

Erica screws up her face back, like, _I know, adults are so stupid, you better get it over with._ She has a cool birthday hat on, and there are little red lines cut into her chin from the string.

Grudgingly, he leans over and smacks his mouth against her cheek, flat like a fish's kiss.

 

+

"Do you want to know why you're here?" Erica's mother asks him on another occasion.

It's New Year's Eve, and she's being a little weird, but Mark is willing to put up with it because she has a glass of something sunlight-colored and bubbly and he's never smelled anything like it before, and maybe if he's good enough, she'll let him have a sip.

"Because," she continues, without waiting for an answer. "Because _your mother --"_ she drags it out the same way the boys from the second grade would say, _Michaela has geeeeeeerms!_ "Could never let me have anything for myself without wanting it too. I shouldn't have told her I thought I might be pregnant, because what did she do?" She gestures vaguely at him, like it's an answer, and Mark frowns a little bit, because he doesn't get it.

He doesn't like not getting things, it's frustrating.

Mark and Erica were born three weeks and four days apart, one at the beginning of the month and the other at the end, which is long enough that their families can't get away with being cheap and just celebrating one birthday for the both of them. Erica and Mark each get a whole party just for them, and it's the only day in the entire year where, for once, one of them is more important than the other.

They start kindergarten together, and before she sends them into the building, Mark's mom gets down on her knees on the sidewalk so she can hold them both tight by the shoulder.

"I want you two to stay together, okay?" she says, in her very serious Mom voice. "I will be here to pick you up as soon as school lets out, but until you see me, I want you to stick close to each other. Don't talk to strangers -- don't talk to anyone who isn't me. Don't let each other out of your sight, not even for a minute. Can you do that for me?"

"Yes, Mom," says Mark, very solemn and now very scared.

"Yes, Aunt Helen," says Erica, and Mark doesn't even sigh when she grabs his hand, because it's important.

But when they get to the big yellow room that's going to be their classroom, the teacher makes them let go. Erica, she says, bending down to talk to them, and she is very sweet and has a face as doughy as pie. Erica has to go sit over there, because her last name begins with an A. You, Mark, you have to sit over there, because your last name begins with Z.

She puts a hand on Mark's wrist, gentle and coaxing, like he's going to pull his hand from Erica's.

If Erica is on that side of the room, then how is Mark supposed to see her? That's not sticking close! That's the other side of the room!

_Don't let each other out of your sight._

"It's okay," says the teacher nicely.

Mark bites her.

 

+

"Do you remember that time you bit Mrs. Yates?" she asks him later; she is eighteen and sprawled out on her back on his bed, legs stretched up against the wall and crossed at the ankle. _The Old Man and the Sea_ is held aloft in her hands, although she lowers it to her chest so that she can stretch her neck, looking at him with her finger tucked in between the pages to mark her place. Her hair is a dark waterfall against his bedspread, and the pleats of her school skirt have slipped down her thigh, but they're too starched to really give in to gravity.

"The stories of me biting our kindergarten teacher have been greatly exaggerated," Mark retorts immediately; he is eighteen, and there's an e-mail from Microsoft sitting in his inbox that he doesn't even know what to do with.

Erica's mouth quirks wryly. "I remember, because I had to hide you afterwards."

He sends her a droll look, wrapping an arm around the back of his chair.

"Hey, it's true. I was so scared you were going to get into deep shit, so I dragged you down the hall and we hid in the girl's bathroom, thinking that if they couldn't find us then they'd forget we were in trouble, remember? Only we didn't know it was the girl's bathroom."

"We still got into deep shit." Mark remembers; they brought his mom in so that she could kneel down outside their hiding place and tell them that if they didn't come out, then they couldn't go to school, and didn't they want to learn?

_I don't want to learn!_ he'd retorted, loud and petulant through the stall door. _School is dumb! School is very, very dumb!_ And Erica had pinched his ribs, hard, because he wasn't supposed to say 'dumb,' it's a bad word, but Mark was absolutely firm. He and Erica were supposed to stay together, that's what they were told to do, and he'd seized on that with the fervent power of conviction, so anything that didn't help him do that _was_ stupid and needed to go, and why couldn't anybody see that was perfectly reasonable?

"They never did try to separate us again, though, did you notice?"

They'd compromised. They rearranged the desks so that everyone sat in a circle, and the Z people looped back around to meet the A people, and Mark and Erica got to sit side-by-side, the way they were meant to.

 

+

The Albrights live two floors down; that's four flights of stairs, fourteen stairs each. He counts them unconsciously, pounding up and down on his way from her door back to his.

Once, while the paint was still new, he carved his name into the railing on the landing outside the Albrights' door, which was kind of a dumb thing to do, since that meant everybody knew who did it. The superintendent never painted it over, though, so it's still there; the sharp, jagged marks of the 'M' and the 'Z', the crooked curves in the softer letters, 'a's and 'b's and 'g's. When they were little, they used to spread out on their bellies on the landing, dangling Jolly Ranchers on a string like fishing tackle down in between the railing, just to see if anyone would notice candy suspended in midair as they came up the stairs -- all the tired-eyed people with their mail in hand and plastic shopping bags digging into their arms.

Mark's parents talk about moving, like, _all_ the time, especially now that Mark has a lot of younger siblings and they've had to convert the back half of their living room into another bedroom, separated by a folding partition and a shower curtain. There's never enough room at the dinner table; the right-handers and the left-handers elbow each other, and someone always flicks flats of butter at each other's faces and blames it on the brother or sister sitting next to them.

They need the space, they keep on saying, and sometimes on weekends they'll drive out to the suburbs to look at places, but they never move.

Mark sneaks downstairs to the Albrights a lot, because it's just Erica and her mom and he likes their apartment; it's all bookshelves everywhere and a telescope out on the balcony, and his aunt smiles and puts a finger to her lips when she catches him reading her paperback Stephen Kings, which his parents won't let him have because they think it's inappropriate for his age group.

"If you really want a sister, you can have one of mine," he tells Erica, right after she hangs up with Mark's mom, who called downstairs just to double-check that's where he was. He could hear the tinny echo of Lillybelle screaming even across the room -- she's teething and can't chew on things fast enough. "Leah, maybe, she's all right."

"Leah doesn't even know how to read, why would I want her," Erica protests.

She crouches down on her heels, blowing into her cartridge before shoving it into the SNES. She snakes out a controller and brings it to him, keeping the main controller for herself, which, whatever, it's her house.

"Can't we adopt you instead?" she asks, as they settle into the cushions and wait for the start screen to load. "I mean, you're over here all the time anyway."

Mark scrunches his nose up. "Yeah, but I don't want you to be my sister," he tells her, because 'sister' is synonymous with 'responsibility' in his head. Sisters are important, and brothers are important, and you're always supposed to look out for them, Mark, and teach them how to be good kids, and make sure nothing happens to them, because you're the oldest and you're supposed to set an example. They're a lot more work than they are fun, that's for sure, and don't tell anyone, but Mark is _terrified_ of messing it up.

Cousins are different, and he likes Erica much better as a cousin than he ever would as a sister, because cousins aren't quite so exhausting. They're more like friends than family, and Mark and Erica do everything together. 

Sometimes, when his homeroom lets out for lunch early, he'll sit in the cafeteria waiting for Erica's class to come in, two single-file lines, alphabetical order with the teacher at the front like Moses parting the Red Sea, and he'll watch the kids who eat alone because nobody wants to sit with them. 

It's mean to leave them by themselves, maybe, but Mark's glad he'll never be one of them. Erica always sits next to him, and if people want to sit with Erica, that means they have to sit with Mark, too.

" _Fine,"_ Erica huffs out, like he's demanding too much of her. He's pretty sure she lets him pick the cooler player on purpose, but that's okay, he'll let her win. Only for the first round, though.

 

+

Mark learns about puberty just in time for Erica to start going through it.

It doesn't happen all at once, which is maybe why it sneaks up on him, because it's difficult to see steady change in somebody that you see every day.

She gets taller, and starts spending more time in her room with her door closed, which is strange because they learned early that they had to share and thus developed an almost _inability_ to keep things from each other. Mark wonders if he should be bothered, but her mom just installed AOL and she lets him use it unsupervised and Mark's enchanted by the screeching call of the dial-up, swaying with his hand on the mouse like a snake charmed.

Eventually, though, he asks Ms. Albright about it.

Her face creases, the way it does when she's debating with herself as to whether or not to tell the truth; weighing up her answer against his maturity. "Erica just wants some privacy," she settles on.

Mark frowns. "Okay," he goes, blank. He doesn't remember the last time he had some privacy; it's unnecessary, because he has nothing to hide. 

Privacy is a luxury for people without younger siblings.

In the summer after they turn twelve, their whole family bundles up and takes a day trip to the coast; something they haven't done since Mark was really little, simply because it's so hard to organize something like that; Mark's old enough to have a better idea that it's not the money that's keeping them from moving out, not really, but rather the amount of time and effort it takes to pack up a whole family and set it up in a new house.

"We're doing all right," his mother tells him, smoothing his hair back in order to press a kiss to his forehead, her mouth softened into an apologetic shape, like it's occurred to her that it was too much Adult Problems to unload on him, even though he's the oldest. "You seem to be well-adjusted, and between keeping up with the Joneses and sending you guys to college, I'll pick a good education, any day."

"Yeah," goes Mark, for whom college is still a far-off, nebulous thing, like property taxes or global warming.

Mark sunburns despite the persistent cloud cover, and Erica claims to have found a seashell, but the beaches this far north _never_ get seashells, and it turns out to be a bit of salt-weathered seaglass; she slices her middle finger on it and all the horseplay grinds to a halt so that Leah can practice her budding first-aid skills, which only go so far as to include looking serious as she wraps a band-aid around Erica's finger.

After their parents chorus out a summons at the end of the day, she grabs his hand and tugs him into the surf one last time; they catch a wave just as it comes in, a blast of shockingly cold Atlantic water barreling them over. Mark floats in that underwater haze for a moment, tethered only by his cousin's hand in his.

His father eyeballs them as they climb the dunes to reach the van, watching their shirts and shorts drip rivulets of water that blossom into mud around their feet.

"You're not sitting on the upholstery like that," he goes, and fishes clean, dry clothes out of the trunk. He nods towards the row of porta-potties on the other side of the lot. "Go change."

Mark takes one look at the porta-potties when they reach them and glances over at Erica.

"Yeah, no," she agrees, and they duck behind them, peeling their wet clothes from their bodies with difficulty. For the first time, Mark sees that Erica has boobs. Like, actual boobs, like the kind that adults have. Obviously, he knew that, because she isn't shaped the same as she used to be, but this is the first time he's _seen_ them. They're pale and weird, and he turns his back on her because he feels like he should.

When he finishes dressing, he turns back around; she's got a shirt on, then, and scowls as she tries to wrestle an elastic out of her wet, knotted hair.

It doesn't matter, he finds, that her boobs are hidden. He knows they're there, and Erica's body is suddenly alien to him; the curves of it, her gangly growth, the ghosting of hair on her upper lip, all new, all strange.

 

+

He hears the pounding of Erica's feet coming up the flight of stairs outside the apartment before she even reaches their landing, and he rocks his chair back onto its hind legs so he can unlock the door before she reaches it.

"Hey," he goes, as she bangs inside, dropping her backpack on their small mountain of shoes. "How was play practice?"

"Long," she responds, and checks for signs of Mark's parents before she lifts the hem of her school blouse, and in a few deft twists of her hands, unrolls the waist of her pleated skirt. She crosses to Mark's chair and shoves him over with a bump of her hip. It's been awhile since they could both comfortably fit, but they find a balance, and Erica's eyes flick over the computer screen. "Is the Internet doing anything interesting?"

He straightens up immediately. "Have you ever heard of p2p sharing?" he goes, and the corner of her mouth quirks up.

In the late stretch of September, Indian summer spreading itself lazily through the days, everybody in their grade takes turns going in for career advising. Mark didn't really have much to say; he hasn't really thought about colleges, or what he wants to do with his life. Someone will tell him, he supposes, same as someone's told him what to do and who to be since the first moment his mother called him over to meet his baby sister; wherever there's a need for him to go, business or technology or bioinformatics -- wherever his intelligence will be most useful, that's probably what he'll wind up doing.

Erica's future changes every day. One day she's talking about the astrophysicists at NASA, the next she's on her belly on Mark's bed, flipping through a book on social work. She talks about teaching English in Korea, and then she talks about buying a school bus and parking it by the side of the road somewhere in the horn of Africa, and running an elementary school. She talks about Peace Corps and she talks about studying abroad and she talks about the need for female politicians and female scientists.

"I just want to go ... away, you know," she explains to Mark one morning, as they sit on the front steps of their school, waiting for the bell to ring. "I thought I'd like to travel, maybe, but I don't know, I don't want to be that stupid American in a foreign country. I'd be too self-aware to enjoy myself, is the thing."

She's slicing an apple into quarters; she offers him one, so he swings his backpack around into his lap and pulls out a jar of peanut butter. She doesn't even look surprised when he screws off the lid and uses the apple slice as a scoop.

"But yeah," she continues, like he'd said something. "I want to go somewhere that isn't our apartment building and isn't this stuffy, stuck-up state."

They take the SATS at the end of the junior year, and get the results in the middle of their summer vacation. Mark gets a perfect score in all three sections.

"Did you _literally_ get nothing wrong?" Erica asks him, droll, when he tilts his sheet of paper in her direction.

He blinks back at her. "Was it supposed to be hard?" he goes, and then frowns, suspicion dawning on him. "Erica. What did you get?" he asks, leaning forward to try and see her letter, which she flattens to her chest.

" _Not_ a 1600," she replies. "Go away, smartass."

Her tone is jovial, but by virtue of the fact that she isn't showing him her score means she's self-conscious and hurt. Mark frowns deeper, a wriggling bit of worry squirming into his belly, because he hadn't _meant_ to be smarter than her. You can't ask him to pretend not to know the answers just to spare somebody else's feelings, not even Erica's, except he doesn't know how to explain that without being mean. He can be mean to other people just fine, because other people aren't as important as she is.

"Whatever," he goes, and hikes his shoulders up in a half-shrug, like he can't bring himself to care. "We don't have to worry about it yet, and we'll go to whatever college you test into, even if it is, like, Brown."

"Why thank you," she goes, voice as dry as bone. "How noble of you."

"I try," Mark deadpans back.

 

+

"You know," he confesses to her, quiet in the graveside silence of the cafeteria after-hours. "Just because I got perfect 800s in all sections doesn't mean I'm _smart."_

"No, you're not," she agrees immediately, and touches the nape of his neck to get him to tilt his head back. She slaps the frozen peas to the bridge of his nose and arc of his eyebrow, ignoring his hiss and the way his body jerks under hers. "You can test well all you like, but you are getting absolutely nowhere in life until you learn that you can _not_ walk up to Randy White's girlfriend and tell her her new rack is great, but she can stand to lose a few pounds around the hips. You will be dead."

"Her boobs were a fucking sixteenth birthday present from her dad, don't even try to tell me that isn't the skeeviest thing you've ever heard."

"Doesn't _matter,_ Mark, it was an asshole thing to say. Hold that," she jerks her chin at the peas, and he reaches up to replace her hand with his.

He catches her wrist, wrapping his fingers around it and pressing into her pulse briefly. Her face softens some, and she slips her hand free. She lets him turn his head into her hip instead, pressing his face against the wash-worn fabric of her blouse.

"Girls are stupid and their boyfriends are worse," he mutters. His whole face throbs with every beat of his heart, every rush of blood through damaged veins.

"I'm going to let that slide, since I consider it rude to punch someone when they've been punched once already today," she tells him, matter-of-fact.

"Too bad I can't take all your standardized tests and you can't conduct all social interactions for me," he goes.

"You just ... need to be nice to people," she puts a hand on top of his head, brushing down from crown to ear in something like a caress. "And not say everything that comes into your head, like because it comes from you, it has to be so clever."

Mark shrugs, because it's grade school politics all over again -- why would he sit anywhere if he didn't know he already had a place? Why would he want to talk to anyone who wasn't her?

 

+

They are each other's first kiss, and second kiss, and third and fourth.

It's only logical, after all. Why can you hand down clothes to cousins, recycle books and borrow each other's CDs, finish choice portions off each other's plates, but suddenly things get scary when you swap spit with cousins? Mark trusts Erica more than anyone -- she won't make fun of him, she won't tell all the girls in their grade that he's a horrible kisser, and likewise, he won't tell any of the guys that the first time she tried to use tongue, she snuffled up her nose and then had to yank back to sneeze.

They have to learn sometime, right?

It just makes _sense,_ to pull a chair up to hers in her bedroom and straddle it, take a deep breath like he's about to jump off a diving board and say, "let's do this."

The experience has to come from somewhere. You rearrange the desks so that the end of the alphabet can sit next to the beginning, and they always learn best when they're with each other. So sure, Mark knows what the inside of Erica's mouth tastes like. He knows that soft spot on her palette that he can trace with his tongue that makes her whole body shiver. He knows how she likes to smile in the middle of a kiss, and then turn a kiss into a bite; a slow drag of teeth over his bottom lip. 

None of that is weird. Why would it be?

It isn't until later, in a completely unrelated context, that Mark first hears the term _dirty kissing cousins,_ and his jaw clenches, muscle ticking in his cheek as something curdles in the pit of his stomach like the skrim on the surface of hot milk.

He's not used to shame. He's not used to letting other people _make_ him feel ashamed, and he doesn't like it.

When he goes home that night, after robotics club lets out with all of them feeling just that little bit more nervous about the approaching regionals, he waits until Erica's mom goes into the other room with a book, and then pushes himself along the sofa cushion, and waits until Erica lifts her head to see what he's looming for. 

He kisses her, open-mouthed. She makes a startled noise against his mouth, lips shifting like she's searching for a hold. Her fingers flutter against his cheek, and then lower back to her lap.

"You weirdo," she goes, when they separate. "What was that for?"

"Nothing," he responds. He doesn't feel dirty at all, but he holds off for another beat because he thinks he's supposed to, and when she doesn't go back to her homework, he leans in again. She tilts her chin up.

 

+

At $45 a pop, Mark doesn't let himself think too much about college applications. Judging by the way his advisor's eyebrows hiked when he sort of shrugged his SAT scores at her, he doesn't have much to worry about. He only applies to the one. More economical that way.

Erica, however, has schools and back-ups to those schools. Mark meets her outside the advising office, watching her slip a paper with a Chicago - Loyola header on it into an envelope, and feels a little sick.

"Why would you want to go there?" he asks, setting his jaw. "That's forever away."

She sighs, thumbing underneath the strap of her messenger bag and hefting it up her shoulder. "It's my 'dream on' school anyway," she says to her sandals. "She and I both agreed Loyola was probably going to laugh in my face, but it wouldn't hurt to try anyway. I have more likely options," she waves the envelope.

"But Loyola's just --" he starts, and then stops, because she gets a peculiar look on her face, and it reminds him of the way he felt when he first heard _dirty kissing cousins_ \-- like shame and hatred of that exact shame was going to eat him up -- and realizes he wouldn't wish that on anyone.

"I just don't test that well," she mumbles. "Not for the Ivy League. So --"

"Okay," he says, cutting her off. And then, "Wait here." He backs up, holding a finger suspended so that she stays where she's standing, and then pops back into the college advisor's office. And asks her if she has an extra application for Boston University.

Her eyebrows do that thing again, but without a word, she turns to her desktop and clicks around some. Mark rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet. He's wearing his mother's old Birkenstocks, he realizes, and tries to remember if he remembers putting them on this morning. He doesn't.

"I sent it to the printer," the advisor tells him, and he nods and darts back out.

Erica's at the tray, flipping through the application. Her eyes, surprised and wobbly and a number of things Mark isn't entirely sure what to do with, dart up to his and then away; he takes the application from her -- the pages are still warm -- and stuffs them into his backpack.

"It's a good school," he manages.

"You mean it's not a bad school," she corrects.

He shrugs uncomfortably. "You could do worse," and sidesteps when she digs for his ribs.

Leaning against the far wall, his sports duffel held between his crouched legs, Randy White squints at them. He has a cellular phone, although why his parents trust him with anything expensive or valuable in high school, Mark will never know; it's one of the new kind that flips, so he keeps whipping it open and snapping it shut. It gets on everybody's nerves. 

"Are you guys _really_ going to the same college?" he goes. He doesn't wait for them to answer before he snorts, " _Wow._ Do you keep everything else in the family, too?"

"I'm sorry your well-endowed girlfriend turned out to actually have a mind of her own and dumped you," Mark responds immediately, because Erica told him he should try harder to be nice to people; apologizing seems like a good start. His mouth has other ideas. "Although if you had any idea what you were doing, she might have stuck around; between the two of you, you might have had enough brain cells to fire at least enough neurons for a conversation."

"What?" goes Randy White.

There's a pause. They look at each other awkwardly.

"It's kind of anticlimatic when you cleverly insult someone and they're not intelligent enough to understand it," Mark remarks to Erica.

"Yeah," she says, and nudges the shin with the toe of her sandal. "Hey, there's taquitos in the caf today. Do you want some?"

"Okay," he goes, and turns.

 

+

Erica finds somebody else to kiss for a while there, since that's kind of the point, and Mark thinks that maybe he can try with one of the girls from his robotics club, because she's the biggest nerd he's ever met, but every time he works up the courage to call her over to sit with him at lunch, or to ask her about something other than school when they're in club meetings, he misses all his chances.

The first time they have sex, they lie next to each other on the floor of her bedroom -- since that was the only place roomy enough to try -- and breathe unsteadily.

(Later, this story will be _really_ fucking funny, and when he tells it, Eduardo will laugh at him and say, "and that's why you never let virgins have sex with other virgins," like he thinks Mark is a clueless kid but hilariously so -- Mark fucking _hates_ Eduardo when he uses that voice.)

"That was --" she starts, and frowns.

"That was extremely unsatisfying," he finishes. "Somehow I thought there'd be more to it than that."

"Same," she huffs out.

He rolls onto his side, propping himself up on his elbow. "This was your idea," he reminds her, dancing his fingers up the inside of her thigh. It's stubbly, since there's still snow on the ground and she doesn't really ever shave in the winter -- there's no reason to. "Although I can safely say I get more out of my right hand than I did out of this thing," he hooks his first two fingers against the opening of her vagina, pointedly, and then yelps when she grabs his fingers and yanks them back.

"Ow ow ow ow _ow!"_ he shrieks, voice climbing an entire octave, his wrist bending in some obscene direction when he tries to relieve the pressure: she's bending his knuckles back almost to his wrist.

"Yeah, that's right," Erica snaps, following the movement of his body and pinning his thighs down with her knees. "Let's see you use this hand after I _break it."_

There's a polite rap on the door, and they freeze. 

"Erica, dear, what are you doing in there?" her mother's voice comes through, and the doorknob jiggles when she tries to twist it. "And why is the door locked?"

Mark and Erica's eyes flash to each other, panicked and taking in their current position; both of them naked, Mark's dick lazily flopped along his thigh with the condom still on, Erica with her breasts swaying in his face, spread out on the floor on the worn down comforter Erica's had since her favorite thing in the world was The Magic School Bus. Mark thinks about his aunt walking in on them like this, and from this moment to the time Cameron Winklevoss chases him across the Square, it's the closest he ever gets to sudden death.

Erica recovers first.

"Because," she shouts back, remarkably level. "Mark's head is so far up his ass that he can probably see our ancestors. We shouldn't let him out in public."

"... okay," says her mom after a beat. And then, "Tell him to tell our ancestors that the next time they come across a burning bush, they should probably just ignore it, okay?"

"Okay," Mark and Erica chorus together, and when Ms. Albright shuffles off down the hall, they collapse together, wheezing out in small, highly-mortified whimpering giggles, like, _did that just happen?_

"Oh my god, I am never going get hard _again,"_ he whispers, up against her ear.

She plants a hand on his shoulder, lifting herself up so that she can peer down at him, and then her lips part over a wicked gleam of teeth. "Then," she says, and since she still has her fingers loosely coiled around his, she pulls it downwards. "I suppose it's a good thing I have a faster recovery time than you do, but we're going to have to be _quiet."_

Mark swallows dryly. "Fuck," he manages, and then stretches out with the pads of his fingertips, watching her eyelids flutter.

 

+

Acceptance letters come in March, right after Mark more or less tells Microsoft to go suck itself. 

BU's come first, completely identical in every way except for the names at the top of the page. Mark calls his parents at work to tell them, and on the way home, they stop to pick them up a congratulatory cake from the bakery on Monroe Ave. It has a happy-looking fondant T-Rex on it, and Mark and Erica have a thumb-war to determine who gets to eat its face.

And then Mark gets the letter from Harvard.

It's Lillybelle who gets sent downstairs to fetch the mail, and she comes pounding back up to their floor, taking the stairs two at a time. She's fourteen, and all up in the kind of acne that'll leave her with scars for years to come, but her face is positively glowing with excitement when she hands Mark a heavy envelope with the crimson Harvard seal on it.

"Holy shit," says Mark, who'd forgotten, and for once, nobody calls him out for saying a bad word.

He runs his fingers underneath the envelope fold, and then looks at his parents questioningly. Their family is so big that even a minivan can't seat all of them at once -- either somebody rides bitch between the two front seats, or they take two cars -- so if this isn't going to be financially feasible, then he doesn't want to open it.

Mr. Zuckerberg covers Mrs. Zuckerberg's hand with his.

"We'll manage," he says, a promise, and Mark makes a mental note to apply for every scholarship known to man, because while yes, they're affluent (their idea of rich is to have enough to feed them, clothe them, and give them books to read, and have enough left over to tip a waitress an extravagant amount on rare occasion, just to make her day -- and right before Mark started high school, his parents gave up on the moving out idea altogether and bought the next-door apartment and knocked down the wall separating the two; six bedrooms still wasn't enough for everybody to have their own, but two bathrooms was basically paradise,) he can still cause them the least amount of financial grief he can.

"You're not setting the bar high for the rest of us," goes Leah, sarcastic. "Not at all."

Later, when he shows Erica the letter, her eyes tick as far as the _Congratulations!_ before they meet his.

"You're not going to BU, are you," she says. It's not a question.

"No," Mark agrees, and they smile at each other, helpless and proud.

 

+

 

In the end, it only takes about three hours and a single suitcase to pack up Mark's entire life and move him out, and most of that was spent arguing with his brother over whose copy of _1984_ was propping up the coffee table.

He feels like there should have been a little more pomp and circumstance, or something -- like maybe it should have been a little bit more difficult to, like, completely pull every sign that Mark Zuckerberg ever existed right out of their home. He feels strangely erased, once he hears the door click shut behind his back, muffling the _so long, sucker!_ s and the _goodbye, Mark_ s and the _I claim his bunk, I claim his bunk!_ s.

Two floors down, he leans against the railing on the landing outside the Albrights' apartment and listens to Erica's mom make her double-check that she has everything -- train ticket and driver's license and toiletries and asthma medication, underwear and socks and her favorite novels. Not for the first time, either, if the way Erica's grumbling increases in volume is any indication.

There's an oblong mirror lofted up high in the corner, presumably so that people don't round that corner blind while carrying heavy objects. Mark drifts over to it, tilting his head back and studying himself.

Here's a small man, with not much to him, and he knows that for a fact rather than by observation, because that mirror will make anybody look diminutive. He has an unsmiling face, a low, heavy brow like a Neanderthal, and eyes with no color to them. His clothes are soft-looking and shapeless; Mark has never bothered with anything fashionable in his life, because all his clothes will pass down to his siblings one way or another and they need to be versatile. Mark has mastered the art of taking up as little space as possible, as less food and sleep and money as he can.

The floor creaks behind him. Erica touches his back, her hand warm through the cotton of his shirt.

She's wearing a cardigan the same soft purple of lilacs, patched at the elbows where the fabric has worn away to white, an underneath it, a summer dress. She's in cabled grey tights and heavy construction boots that used to be her mom's; Mark remembers Ms. Albright sometimes had to bring them to a site with her on the weekends -- they had felt like superheroes with the big yellow hats and the clobbering boots.

Besides their height and slender build, they don't look much alike, he realizes as her studies their reflections together. Her face is sweet and round, and she escaped inheriting the family hair; hers spills gossily down to the small of her back, and only starts curling up in high humidity. He watches as she pushes a lock of it behind her ear, catching it there with a crosshatch of bobby pins.

"Let's go, before she makes me run the gauntlet one more time," she mutters out of the corner of her mouth, and Mark smirks.

 

+

On the train, Erica makes small talk with the woman sitting across from them, while Mark drowses, cheek pillowed precariously on the ball of her shoulder and rocking with the motion of the train.

Erica mentions that it's move-in day for the greater Boston area schools, which has to be pretty hard to miss, because Mark and Erica aren't the only two on the train with their entire lives packed away into suitcases, boxes, and bags, wearing university sweatshirts that haven't been washed into shape yet. The woman tinkles out a good-natured laugh and says, "Where did you say you were going? I always heard that it was bad luck for couples to attend the same college."

Mark's eyes flare open, and then he thins them at her.

"We're _cousins,"_ he bites, before Erica can say anything, and chagrin flinches across the woman's face. "Family stays with family, that's what family _does."_

"It'll be nice," says Erica placidly. "Knowing someone in the same city. Won't be so lonely."

 

+

In Boston, nobody knows who they are.

Nobody looks at them and thinks they should have just been born twins, not here; nobody here knows that once, Mark and Erica competed to see who could swing the highest on the playground -- they fell when the chains themselves came off the frame, fracturing their arms in the exact same place. 

Nobody here knows that, growing up, one of Mark's favorite things was the view outside his parents' bedroom window: it overlooked the parking lot and the back of the next apartment building, but at night, when all the windows were dark and the only light came from the street lamp, the cars lined up in the lot looked like the malicious grin of some gaping mouth; filled with crooked, gleaming teeth. Nobody here knows that Erica used to tell the boys who were bigger than her that her big brother was going to beat them up, back before she figured out that Mark was never going to be bigger than any of the boys.

It's lonely at first, of course it is, because they go to different schools.

There's nothing quite as intimidating as being as freshman, standing in a new quad watching everybody else greet people they already know, and realizing you don't know a single soul. Erica won't be in any of his classes, she won't be holding down a table at lunch, she won't catch the bus home with him on the days she doesn't have play practice, and Mark's never really bothered to learn how to socialize.

And then he gets over it, because there's nothing else to be done.

Five minutes into his eight AM class, his phone vibrates with a text, loud enough to startle the drooping girl in the seat next to him; she sits up abruptly, scrubbing at her face.

_I may have just verbally eviscerated this creepy guy who's been lingering around the girl's bathroom. Is this what it's like to be you all the time?_

Mark grins. _you have learned well, young padawan,_ he texts back. 

At the end of class, it earns them all a dry remark from the professor about how they're not fooling anyone, he can tell when students are using their phones, because there's no other reason they would smile like that at their crotches; what an astounding example of deductive Harvard skills, Mark thinks, and shoulders his backpack and joins the stream of people filtering into the hallway. He has ten minutes and he's pretty sure his next class is across campus.

 

+

Three weeks into the start of term, Mark meets Dustin when Dustin tows his roommate Billy down the dorm hallway on a skateboard that Billy clearly doesn't know how to balance on. Mark's coming back from brushing his teeth in the bathroom at the end of the hall and stops, amused, to watch Dustin pound on every doorway and announce that an intensely badass game of Apples to Apples is starting in 3J in five minutes.

"Come on, bro!" says Billy, adopting some unidentifiable accent that's probably supposed to sound like Bob Marley. He gestures to Mark. "Hop on."

So Mark shoves his (still wet) toothbrush into the kangaroo pouch of his sweatshirt and does exactly that, because he and Billy are so slight that they can both fit, and Dustin only hollers good-naturedly before putting his back into steering them down the hall.

He winds up getting along with them because they have the exact opposite problem he does; they have no idea when to _stop_ socializing. Dustin doesn't require any input during a conversation in order to keep producing output, and Billy grins and chews so much Big Red that Mark wonders if, when they cut him open on an autopsy table, they'll find petrified clumps of swallowed gum obstructing his intestines, and the day after the Apples to Apples game, they slam their trays down next to Mark at the cafeteria where Mark is trying to finish eating as soon as possible, and continue on conversing with him like there was never a break.

_Grade school politics,_ Mark thinks, and doesn't bother moving seats. He was here first.

With Dustin comes Chris, a journalism student who _hands_ Mark's ass to him during a discussion about the merits of investigative reporting; literally deconstructs his argument on the spot, and even for a moment looks like he's about to hand Mark a works-cited to go with it. 

He's also probably gay, which is interesting because Mark hasn't actually met a gay person before -- it just wasn't anything anybody mentioned by name in his hometown, and he never socialized to the point where that would be something he learned about someone, so the broad spectrum of sexuality always seemed like it was just something that happened somewhere else.

With Chris comes Eduardo, and for the first time in Mark's life, he actually has a group of people he wants to impress, wants to see when they don't have somewhere else to be, wants to laugh with and make laugh.

Somewhere along the line, Erica informs him that most people call that friendship.

 

+

Mark's roommate freshman year sort of hates his guts, which, whatever, the dude's an only child and his mom's spearheading some trans-Alaskan oil pipeline and is getting filthy rich doing it, and he all but grew up on a private yacht in a harbor in Connecticut. It's not like they _ever_ had a prayer of getting along.

He and Erica alternate crashing at each other's dorms during the weekends, and when it's her turn to come up to Cambridge, he takes perverse pleasure in hanging a sock on the door for as long as obnoxiously possible, the entire time they're sitting there with take-away from the caf and things to make fun of on the Internet.

"Has he ever actually _done_ anything to you to deserve this?" she asks him, tone wry, after the third time he does it. 

"I can't be held responsible for other people's unfortunate decision to exist and be the way they are," Mark deadpans back at her, and changes the subject. "How's the inferior college going?"

She rolls her eyes.

Dustin and Billy invite him out to this burger place they've just discovered one weekend ("and they have these hot dog and beef burgers and they make them with Hebrew National, kill me now, it's _so_ good,") and it doesn't even occur to him that Erica might not be invited until he gets there, and their eyes all but double in size when she scoots into the booth next to Mark, tugging down the hem of her skirt and pressing her side against his to make room for Chris, who squeezes in with them.

"You know a girl," Dustin goes blankly, and jumps a little in his seat, like Chris had just kicked him under the table.

"With the shock, really?" Mark mutters. "It's not that difficult to believe."

Eduardo recovers first, and leans around their water glasses to give Erica his friendly businessman grin. "Hi," he goes. "You are ...?"

"Erica," she answers, and smiles at the chorus of _hi, Erica_ s that follow. "Mark and I have known each other literally since we were born."

"She's three weeks older than I am."

"I abuse it constantly," Erica agrees.

Unsurprisingly, it's one of the better nights of Mark's first semester at Harvard, having Erica and his friends together in one place. It works for them, too, of course, because Mark's so much easier to handle when Erica is there to translate.

"You just have to learn how to hold more than one conversation at the same time," she tells them laughingly. "Like changing settings on a Stairmaster. It's exhausting, but after nineteen years, you get a taste for anticipating it."

He'll think back on it later, and realize that no, at no point that night did he ever mention that she's his cousin, that their mothers are each other's sisters, that Randy White maliciously tried to get the yearbook staff to vote them "most likely to move to Arkansas and have fourteen kids." It wasn't intentional, it just ... wasn't relevant, so they didn't bring it up, which is why, at a party that the RAs sigh at and pretend that they don't know everything is copiously spiked with Absolut, he double-takes in surprise when Dustin choruses, "go on, Mark, don't be shy, kiss the girl!" after Mark pulls the _kiss another member of your party_ block out of the College Edition Jenga tower.

Erica beats him to it; she plants her hands on Mark's shoulders to pin him back against his chair and her spine curves into it when she presses her grin against his.

"Isn't that cheating?" Eduardo wonders at large, as everybody whoops and Mark opens his mouth with the ease of practice to slick his tongue in between her teeth, hand settling against her ribs. "I mean, they're basically dating anyway."

And at that point, Mark feels like a complete idiot for not having realized this sooner.

 

+

In Boston, nobody knows who they are.

Autumn becomes winter becomes spring becomes summer, and the feeling of newfound freedom never wears off, makes it easy to forget. They're drunk on it, atmospheric and sunshine bright and there's something innately, personally powerful about standing up and saying _fuck it._

They moved so far away from home that they are literally new people, and they use it.

When they have sex -- either in Mark's drafty old ivy-encrusted dorm that feels kind of like being ass-naked in front of three hundred years of history or in Erica's economical housing unit that actually possesses central heating -- it's loud, it's enthusiastic, it's messy, because they _can,_ they can, and fuck it if there are people on their floor who can hear them. After a year of careful, awkward experimentation, perpetually terrified of Erica's mother on the other side of the door or getting caught in the backstage costume room, Mark _wants_ this.

He wants everybody to hear them, because no one's ever going to quite understand how monumentally _astounding_ it is that they're even here at all: that when Mark does the walk of shame Monday morning, it's without any shame at all; that Erica can yank his head back to suck a hickey into his throat and he doesn't have to cover it up; that when Erica's roommate asks, she says, "Yeah, I guess I am seriously dating him," and catches his eye, head tilted and eyes soft.

"Every boy I have ever met," she mumbles against the ball of his shoulder the next weekend, their sheets a nest tangled around them, slick and warm. She smiles, letting Mark nose in to kiss her eyelids, for no other reason than they're there. "And I just wind up comparing them to you."

"I've never bothered looking anywhere else," he tells her, matter-of-fact. "That implies that there's someone better out there."

They try everything they can think of, and then they ask around for ideas for more.

"Did it ever occur to you," says Chris. "To keep that kind of shit to yourself?"

Mark just shrugs. Privacy is for people who have something to be embarrassed about.

They watch porn together like they did in high school, pointing out plot inconsistencies and continuity errors and then almost getting caught in the showers together later. 

They even Google things out of the Kama Sutra, and Dustin pushes himself off the couch to come see what they're laughing at. He calls Chris and Billy and Eduardo over, and five minutes of _what the fuck is that even_ becomes fifteen minutes of them trying to fold themselves into pretzels to see in what way is it sexy _at all,_ and then cramping up from laughing too hard.

 

+

Mark learns every new thing there is to learn about Erica's body, until nothing is alien to him anymore, not the dip of her anklebone or the dusting of hair on her upper lip, not the soft fleshy inside of her lip up by her gums or the falling ladder of vertebrae in her back.

They talk about the future, sometimes. Mark officially declares a CS major at the end of his freshman year, and Erica picks up Performing Arts as a minor.

"Yeah, our career fields are really going to overlap," she goes amusedly, while he dozes in the grass in the main quad, having pulled an all-nighter trying to get CourseMatch live before registration opened for the next year.

"We'll take Billy and your roommate and start an a-cappella group," he decides, mumbling, and smiles proudly when she throws her head back to bark with laughter.

"Or, no," he says, some other time. "I know. We'll become truckers. Let's face it, it's kind of the only thing you can do with a Fine Arts degree from BU," and she rolls her cheek against his neck, finding the tender skin at the inside of his elbow and giving it a hard pinch in retaliation. 

He doesn't tell her, but for an hour or two, he seriously considers it -- a Harvard degree, and he'll use it to buy themselves a big rig, some eighteen-wheeler with a chrome grill and maybe some fuzzy dice.

Everywhere they go, it'll be like Boston all over again; nobody will know who they are, or give two shits where they're going or where they're from, or what they're going to do in the dirt-cheap highway motels. Mark might go stir-crazy from the lack of stimulation on the open road, but it would be worth it, he thinks, for the anonymity.

"It'll just be the two of us," he says, propped up against the headboard with his laptop open across his thighs. She's asleep, turned into the wall, and can't hear him. "Trucking our brains out and having sex in every single state, and nobody can say shit about it."

_Most likely to move to Arkansas and have fourteen kids,_ and for a second, Mark even thinks about that, too -- something curly-haired and dimpled, climbing into his lap as he codes just because it wants to be a part of what he's doing, something half-Erica and half-him -- and shivers full-body, pressing it away, very deep down.

 

+

Erica is fucking _pissed_ when the news about FaceMash hits, and yeah, he probably should have seen that coming.

"It had nothing to do with you!" he protests, after they get the Harvard network back online and she calls him, bitchy and -- for some reason he won't be able to fathom for years -- actually genuinely hurt. "I don't know why you're so mad about it." 

It'd been Billy's idea, and they were bored. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and at least it wasn't farm animals ("he says, like he's expecting praise for _not_ being a bigger douchebag," Erica says acidly.) Eduardo came over after a party none of the rest of them got invited to; he suggested that maybe it wasn't such a good idea for them to be ranking other students, which obviously meant that Mark had to go through with it.

"It's _disgusting,"_ she says, heavily. "I shouldn't have to tell you that."

"You go to BU. You weren't even in it, and anyway, if you were, I would have rigged the game so that you won every time."

"Mark," she sighs. "I love you, but you're really fucking dumb."

"Okay," he says readily enough, because she was there the last time he said something really stupid to a girl and got punched flat for it, too. "But that's why I have you."

 

+

 

Things plateau after The Facebook becomes a _thing._

They run a story in the Crimson, and another in the BU student newspaper, which Erica brings over with a joke about intercepting fanmail next. People start recognizing Mark in the halls now, and approach him in the quad like they weren't avoiding his eyes just a month or two ago, when he was caught in the center of the shitstorm that was the FaceMash fallout.

Mark is honestly just waiting for it to die down, so he can go back to minding his own business, but it doesn't.

And something has to give.

In February, they're at this swanky bar uptown, somewhere they've never been before. He's pretty sure Eduardo's off getting blown in the men's bathroom, and Mark and Erica sit at the bar together, chattering about The Facebook's progress (they only recently solved a server space problem, and in the last twenty-four hours, no new crises has sprung up, which is exciting,) and watching the bathroom door, hawk-like, because you know what would be hilarious? If someone walked in there right now.

Erica's been quiet most of the night, content to let Mark do the talking, which he has no problem with.

He pauses, though, and turns their interlocked hands over, inspecting her nails. "I'm going to tell Mom and Dad soon," he says, finally, and through the fan of his eyelashes, he sees her eyes lid like she's been dealt a blow. "About The Facebook. If we're going to expand, I'm going to need them to back us up."

She finishes the thought for him. "It'll put us under a magnifying glass."

"We're kind of under one already, aren't we?"

On the ride over, Christy had peppered them with questions -- easy, curious questions, no different from the ones Dustin and Billy and the rest asked the first time they met Erica, too, but Mark had felt acutely uncomfortable all the same. It's too close to that feeling he got, the first time he heard _dirty kissing cousins_ \-- something worried, something shameful. One of these days, someone's going to think to ask their families about them.

Erica, of course, is the one who makes the hard decision. She always has been.

Mark always told his career advisor that he would go wherever he was told there was a need for him, and adapt to it when he got there, but Erica made _plans._

She pulls her hand from his and tips his chin up.

"You're going to put The Facebook on other campuses," she informs him, voice low and just for them. She leans in, pressing a kiss to his cheek. "It's going to flourish," and his ear. "It's going to be the coolest thing that ever happened at Harvard, and that includes Natalie Portman," and his temple. "And you will be stupidly famous," and his forehead. "And I ... I will be a footnote mentioned under your loving and supportive family."

He looks up at her, their noses brushing with a brief contact, and for a second, it's as if her round, sweet face takes up his entire field of vision; stars and suns and constellations all.

Her eyes are colorless, the same blue-grey of a blank canvas, and they're the same eyes he has, and their mothers have before them. They lid away from sight when she leans down, her hand fluttering to rest against Mark's pulse, bracing herself there. He kisses her back, instinctive; their mouths together are warm, and they linger with a press, like they're trying to leave a permanent imprint of each other on their own lips.

When Eduardo comes out of the bathroom ten minutes later, flushed all the way down the open collar of his shirt, Mark is sitting at the bar alone, swinging his feet above the floor.

He weaves his way in between the tables, his grin fading. "Hey," he says, coming up beside Mark. "Are you okay?"

Mark drags the very tips of his fingers along the bar's edge, and it's not hard at all to inject the heartbreak into his voice when he says, soft, "Erica broke up with me."

Eduardo's face smoothes out in surprise, going blank for a second before he drags the second stool closer and sinks into it. "I'm here for you," he says, immediate and earnest, and it's rich, coming from someone who's still breathing a little erratically, mouth all spread from somebody else.

Mark hops to his feet. "We're going to expand," he announces over his shoulder as he heads for the exit.

"Expand?" Eduardo echoes, scrambling after him and catching his elbow, pulling them off to the side. Obediently, Mark stops so that they can wait for Christy. "Do you think that's such a good idea?"

"Of course I do. Yale and Columbia, to start with."

He keeps blinking, but he catches up soon enough. "And Stanford," he says, and continues at Mark's look, "if you want this go to places, send it to the other coast. They could use something like The Facebook in Silicon Valley."

"Right," Mark goes, taking in a steadying breath. 

Eduardo studies him, frowning so hard his eyebrows have knitted into a unibrow. His hand is still on Mark's arm, holding him there like an anchor, and Mark looks at it, and thinks, inanely, that he's going to need a new best friend, as if it's as simple as needing a new bike lock or another bottle of hydrogen peroxide. 

"Are you sure you're okay?" Eduardo says, every word measured. "You two seemed fine, and ... I mean, she's hot and you're smart, what better combination is there?"

"Classy," Mark mutters back, and Eduardo has the decency to look embarrassed. "I just want to work now, Wardo, so can we go?"

"Hey," and that's Christy; her hair and make-up have been perfectly reapplied, making her look doll-like and starkly beautiful. The only thing that gives her away is the slight hitch in her voice, that cocksucker rasp that's hard to mask. She blinks at Mark. "Is everything all right?"

"We're expanding," Eduardo tells her.

She accepts this in stride. "Excellent," she says. "What can I do to help?"

 

+

Christy introduces them to Sean.

As easy as it was for Mark to pack up all of his belongings and move out of his family's apartment, like he never existed, it's just as easy to pack it all up again and move himself across the country to the Bay Area of California, where the fog is bitingly cold in the mornings and nobody knows how to obey any of the fucking traffic laws.

He feels like one of those fibrous plants, the kind with the shallow root system, that come up with a simple tug.

He doesn't have much, but what he does have is this house in Palo Alto, and sleepless interns, and a rapidly-growing website that still doesn't quite feel like a company, except it _is,_ and fuck if Mark isn't going to give everything he has to keep it.

It's not something Eduardo understands, which is how they find themselves in a hallway that smells like gym socks and a cloying overlay of Lysol, and Eduardo's face is pinched with fury, hate, exhaustion, saying, "-- just don't get it, Mark, you can't ask me to uproot my entire life and come out here."

"Why _not?"_

And maybe it's stupid of Mark to assume Facebook deserves the same level of dedication of all its employees that Mark himself has put into it, and maybe it's unfair of Mark to expect Eduardo to be like Erica, because nobody can replace Erica. That was their decision. But it still hurts when Eduardo runs the flats of his hands over his wet hair, changing tracks to say, "I know your family lets you get away with whatever you want, so you don't know what it's like, you don't know what kind of position I'm in --"

"I don't know what to tell you, Wardo, it's not that difficult --" "

"-- you've never really had to sacrifice _anything_ \--"

He stops, because whatever crosses Mark's face at that has to be terrifying.

For a second, he can't even say anything, throat swollen shut with the force of _anger_ that flares white-hot through him. " _Don't --"_ he manages, strangled, his spine ramrod straight. "You _ever_ presume to know what I've sacrificed for Facebook."

Eduardo backtracks, shifting his weight, his throat rolling with a hard swallow. Then he squares his shoulders and says, "What did you mean, get left behind?"

 

+

He's napping, head pillowed on his folded arms on the tabletop, lulled by the soft whir of his laptop's processors at his elbow. Somebody bumps the chair next to him, and he sits up, inhaling sharply through his nose. They've turned all the lights down, but what little there is still hurts, and he slants his eyes against it.

One of the lawyers looks down on him, her dove-grey jacket tucked over her arm. Her wide-set eyes are kind, and Mark realizes he doesn't know her name, for all that she's been sitting two chairs down since eight this morning.

"We're done for the day," she informs him, unnecessarily.

"Oh, I'm just going to --" he waves a hand, and then pulls his laptop closer, running his fingers over the touchpad to wake it up. "Do you think anyone would mind?"

"I don't see why it would be a problem," she returns, and hefts the strap of her handbag higher onto her shoulder before she turns and walks for the door. "Have a good night, Mr. Zuckerberg."

"You too, um ..."

"Marilyn," she supplies, clearly having anticipated that. "Marilyn Delpy, I'm --" she pauses, wavering for a beat with one hand on the doorframe, before she turns back to him and says, "Tomorrow morning, Sy's going to suggest that we don't waste any more of our time with this. He wants you to settle. He -- _we_ \-- don't think this case should go to trial."

"Of course," Mark says, hunching his shoulders. One day of this deposition shit down, and he thinks it'll be years before he'll be able to get the knot out from in between his shoulder blades. "I'm not exactly the most sympathetic figure to put up in front of a jury, am I?" Her mouth makes a funny shape, something dangerously close to pity, and he snorts. "Yeah, I'm starting to see that."

"Not only that," she says, very evenly. "But watch what else. Why do we have conflicting testimonies regarding Erica Albright? Mr. Saverin swears up and down that she's your ex-girlfriend, while your sister seems pretty convinced she's your cousin who grew up in the downstairs apartment."

Mark goes still all over. 

"You'll never get Erica on a witness stand," he gets out. He's gripping the edge of the table so hard his fingertips have gone numb. "She's smarter than that. She has nothing to do with Facebook, she'll tell you that."

"Doesn't matter," Marilyn shakes her head. "All someone has to do is ask the question, and suddenly everybody's wondering. Just how close were you?"

He clenches his jaw, highwire tight, and then he snaps. He spins his chair around, putting his back to the Palo Alto city lights and glaring her down. "And what?" he says grittily, voice gone as caustic as rust. "Because I'm an asshole, it'll make it that much easier for people to willingly believe that I fucked my cousin, just, like, as a recreational sport?"

Her eyebrow ticks up, but she doesn't say anything.

He feels a lot like that little kid on his first day of school, snarling and ready to bite because he'd been told to never let Erica out of his sight and now they were telling him to do exactly that. You can uproot Mark Zuckerberg out of that life, but you can't uproot Erica Albright out of Mark Zuckerberg.

This is who Mark is. He only cusses when he's really pissed because he's an older brother and you never grow out of that, and he's impolite to everyone he meets, because the people that matter are the ones that won't be bothered by it.

"Let me tell you something, miss," he says. "Yes, fine, I'm that kid. I took my cousin to prom. I dated her in college, because funnily enough, when you don't _tell_ people you're each other's cousins, they don't seem to care that you sleep together. But I didn't date her _because_ she was my cousin, it's not a reason and it wasn't a big enough deterrent, it was just a _fact."_

He breathes hard through his nose, and pinches the bridge of it. 

"I dated her," he says softly. "Because she was the only person in the world I wanted by my side," the same way he glared down the Winklevosses and said, _I went to Eduardo for the money because he was my best friend._ "And if I managed to do this without her," he gestures, as if he could encompass all of Facebook, all of California, all of the billions of dollars the two of them are worth, in a single motion of his hand. "Then imagine what the fuck I could have done _with_ her."

Marilyn shifts her weight. Her mouth is a thin line, her expression neutral and unreadable, but her eyes are soft.

"Imagine what we could have done, if only the world didn't have such delicate sensibilities about what other people should and shouldn't do with their lives. So no, Ms. Delpy, I guess you're right. I don't have the patience to take this to court and deal with a jury's sanctimonious idea of how I should behave."

"They'll use it against you," Marilyn tells him, calm, like they're talking about something stupid, like FaceMash or Eduardo's PR disaster with the chicken, and not the biggest love of Mark's whole goddamn life. "You know they will."

He huffs, humorless, and when he says, "we weren't hurting anyone," his voice comes out terribly small. "We _weren't."_

_And we gave it up so that I could have this,_ he doesn't need to add.

Marilyn just nods, and says, "We'll bring the settlement papers tomorrow, in case you decide that's what you want to do," before she turns. Mark listens to her heels click all the way to the end of the hall, the loud chime of the summoned elevator.

Slowly, he spins his chair back around, glancing at the site-trafficking window he has maximized on his laptop screen -- logs from the editing staff, IP addresses pinging in a colossal stream of data. There's another window open with an e-mail from his coordinator in Bosnia, and a third, with Erica's Facebook page. He flips over to that one.

A while ago, he got a notification that Erica Albright wanted to be listed as family. He'd ignored that, and a week later, got a friend request instead.

In her profile picture, she's half-turned to talk to somebody else, fingers curled loosely around a wine glass and her mouth already parted, twisted in a wry expression like what she knows she's going to say will be clever. It's not the best shot, since the flash has washed all the color out of her face, but she looks nice, her dress champagne-colored and her hair pinned out of her eyes.

He thinks about sending her a message. _Remember that time I bit Mrs. Yates and you hid me in the bathroom?_

Or. _Do you remember when we used to hang Jolly Ranchers off your landing, like we were fishing for sweet people?_

Or. _Do you remember, right after we moved into the Kirkland suite, you came out of my room wearing nothing but my shirt and boxers, and I came out with nothing but your bra and underwear, and Dustin completely failed at forming coherent sentences?_

He sinks down in his chair, folding his arms so that his fingers get pinned to his ribs, like small and flightless birds.

She's single.

 

 

-

fin


End file.
